Chapter 2 - Climate Data and Monitoring

The Climate Record > Global Climate Databases

The Bureau of Meteorology’s NCC was involved in the WMO Climate Database Management System (CDMS) project together with its counterparts from other National Meteorological Services who have also offered their climate database as a candidate for use by other countries. Consideration is being given to the climate database needs of nations in the South Pacific with a view towards capitalizing on the experience gained in the development of the ADAM system. The NCC also provided the Malaysian private company Technology Park Malaysia with a consultancy to help with the development of an ADAM-like system for the Malaysian Meteorological Service.

Both the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the WMO have designated a number of global data centres, several of which hold data relevant to climate. Australia contributes data regularly to a number of these, including:

• General meteorological data to the World Data Centre A for Meteorology (United States);
• Monthly GCOS Surface Network (GSN) data to the GSN Monitoring Centres (Germany/Japan) for monitoring, and monthly and daily data (including metadata) to the GSN Archive and Analysis centre (United States);
• Monthly GCOS Upper Air Network (GUAN) data to the Lead Centre for Data Quality Monitoring (European Centre for Medium-term Weather Forecasting) and monthly and daily upper air data to the GCOS Upper Air Analysis Centres (United States and United Kingdom);
• Rainfall data to the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (Germany) and the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (United States);
• Runoff data to the Global Runoff Data Centre (Germany);
• Ozone data to the World Ozone and UV Data Centre (Canada);
• Measurements made at Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station and through the global air sampling network to the World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases (Japan), the World Data Centre for Atmospheric Trace Gases (United States) and the GLOBALVIEW Cooperative Atmospheric Data Integration Project of the NOAA Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (United States);
• Oceanographic data to the Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (COADS) (United States) and the World Data Centre for Oceanography (United States);
• Upper-air data to the Comprehensive Aerological Reference Data Set (CARDS) (United States);
• Pressure data for the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) to various centres, including the United States;
• General climatological data to the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN)(United States);
• Glacier data to the World Glacier Monitoring Service (Switzerland);
• Sea-ice data to the World Data Centre for Glaciology (United States) and the Marine Environmental Data Service (MEDS) (Canada);
• Paleoclimatic data (tree rings) to the World Data Centre for Paleoclimatology (United States); and
• Solar radiation data to the World Radiation Data Centre and the World Data Centre for Solar-Terrestrial Physics (both in Russia), with baseline surface radiation network data to the World Radiation Monitoring Centre (Switzerland).

The Joint Australian Facility for Ocean Observing Systems (JAFOOS) acts as the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) Indian Ocean Upper Ocean Thermal Data Assembly Centre (UOTDAC). JAFOOS is operated jointly by the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre and CSIRO Marine Research.